2. Short response questions.
We’d like to know a little more about you. To that end, please choose one of the following questions and write a short response in the space below.

1.Every name tells a story: Tell us about your name–any name: first, middle, last, nickname–and its origin.

My first name is 煜邦/yubang. To understand its meaning, it should be approached as two separate characters. 煜/Yu means laminating and shining. 邦/Bang represents one’s homeland. As a result, my father gave me this name, hoping it would remind me that I should always cherish and flourish the cultural background I am from.

In such respect, my name is a reflection of his patriotism and traditional Chinese family virtue. Incidentally, the name itself was inspired by his admiration for some parts of Maoism and Confucianism. The idea of loving my country originates from his communist identity. He climbed up the social ladder from a farmer’s kid to a middle-class, thanks to the new education policy in his time, in which the poor kids were first time given equal chance to compete with others in formal education through a relatively fair yet strongly competitive testing, named Gaokao. Ranked no.10 in the province that year, my father not only changed his own path by giving a chance to enrol in college, but also he altered the financial situation of his poor family after he successfully earned a master’s degree in microbiology, which was extremely scarce and valuable. He credited this life-changing opportunity to the party’s decision on initiating the Gaokao. The idea of promoting a fair testing system came from Chairman Mao’s new ideology, Maoism.

The other part of my first name represents his family virtue that my father learned from the conventional Confucianism education. Even though Confucianism has its shortcoming for promoting a rigid but stable society through a stiff social stratification, its idea of promoting a strong moral society through its main idea of loyalty and filial piety. One should be loyal to its superiors faithfully, and the superior meanwhile should employ others according to the rules of propriety. Filial piety means to be good to one’s parents by taking care of them; to engage in good conduct not just towards parents but also outside the home so as to bring a good name to one’s parents and ancestors. In a broader spectrum, I should bring a good name to my nation and my Chinese culture.

The wish laid in my name has constantly influenced me as a person and a student that has shown great interest in promoting a great education nationally and globally from a sociology perspective.